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494 17. armies and society in the later roman world
with his war-band was the dominant military figure, it is probable that the
remnants of Romano-provincial forces, under the command of their landlord-warlords,
adopted ‘barbarian’ attitudes and ideals. Peter Brown has
pointed to an ill documented change in lifestyle that brought to a provincial
nobility, now isolated from the imperial court, more frequent opportunities
for fighting. 106 Nevertheless, even in post-reconquest Italy, an extremely
debilitated society, there is evidence in property transactions and legal disputes
for the continuing fusion of the remnants of Theoderic’s Goths with
Romans, and it is likely that the Bulgar mercenaries in the Byzantine armies
also rapidly assimilated themselves. 107 Elsewhere in the west, the process
was not all one way: Arbogast, a descendant of the Frankish magister militum
Arbogast of the late fourth century, held office as comes Trevirorum and
received letters from Sidonius which praised his Latin culture; he asked
Sidonius to compose a work of scriptural exegesis, without success, and
ended up as bishop of Chartres. 108
The rise to power of local commanders had a much greater impact on
local society, and indeed the overall operation of the empire, than the
much-discussed issue of the gradual introduction into territories under
Byzantine control of the ‘theme system’, the term used to designate the territorial
administrative units that underpinned the main Byzantine armies
after the mid seventh century. 109 Themes can be seen as the inescapable
administrative corollary of the gradual change in the nature of Roman military
organization that had been under way, intermittently, for over two centuries.
In the tribal west, armies had been localized at an early stage in the
process, when war-bands took control of specific areas. In the eastern half
of the empire, the Balkan provinces tended to follow the western model,
and territory was allocated, or alienated, to tribal groups during the fifth
and sixth century, a process which culminated in the establishment of Slav,
Serb, Croat and Bulgar groups within the Danube frontier in the seventh
century with only nominal imperial sanction. On the eastern frontier, the
greater vitality of urban life dictated a different development. Here the
imperial presence was strong and the type of fragmentation and piecemeal
allocation of territories to war-bands was impractical: conquest and appropriation
of territory would either be on a vast scale, as the Persians achieved
in the period 610–28 and the Arabs in the 630s, or at a very local and unsustained
level, as with the Persian capture of Amida in 502/3 or Dara in 573.
But once the Roman armies had been driven out of this urbanized sector
and forced to regroup to the north-west in central Anatolia, the nature of
their deployment had to take account of the very different structures of
provincial society in these areas: cities were few and far between, and the
106 Brown, Religion and Society 233. 107 Brown, Gentlemen and Officers 75–6, 70.
108 PLRE ii.128–9, with Heinzelmann (1982) s.v.
109 For this see Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century ch. 6; Hendy, Studies 619–62.
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